The year was 1968. I had just turned six. And this Wonder Woman book was the only choice that day for me:
and it would have been for you, too, had you been a six-year-old girl. The cover promised pure awesomeness: the good Wonder Woman as a little girl, cowering before the great big evil Wonder Woman, who's obviously about to go all Joan Crawford on her. Obviously the story within would be even better--the triumph of good over evil, or youth over age, or both? A great battle wherein the good little Wonder Woman would win by use of her wits?
Well, no. First of all, here's how WW got into the situation in the first place. She's out on a date with Steve Trevor. They are attacked by an evil (you can tell he's evil because he's ugly) villain with a massive crush on WW, who ties Steve to a rock in the middle of a shark-filled pool and threatens to have him killed unless WW kisses him like she means it.
So Wonder Woman has a dilemma. On the one hand, she can save Steve by kissing the Gargoyle, and Steve will dump her because he's such a jerk. On the other hand, she can refuse to kiss the Gargoyle and Steve will be eaten by sharks. Well, okay, that's not such a dilemma--more of a win-win, really, in that in either case Steve is gone. But long-suffering Diana doesn't see it that way, bites the bullet and saves Steve. The ungrateful bastard.
Steve, in an apparently-typical overreaction and despite having already been saved from certain death, managed to throw enough of a fit that he flings himself into the shark pool. Again Diana is forced to save him, this time getting away from the Gargoyle herself as well. Beside herself with grief at the loss of Steve, she takes him in her nifty invisible plane to her own private island, where she attempts to save both his life and his love for her. Didn't know that that Purple Healing Ray also had a "Brainwash" setting, did you?
Poor Wonder Woman. Here she thinks she's got Steve back where she wants him (as for why she wants him, that's another matter) and here's another Wonder Woman from a parallel universe, ready to snatch him up as if he had no will of his own whatsoever (hm...). When the good WW asks her mom for advice, she's told to challenge the evil WW to a contest, with Steve as the prize. Her counterpart readily agrees, but stipulates that the contest must take place on her own home turf and that if she wins, Steve must stay with her (to which he happily accedes, fickle sonoabitch that he is).
(Please note that the matter of how this evil WW got from one Earth to the other is almost entirely ignored. To get to the evil WW's home world, each WW flies her plane into a mysterious cloud and comes out on the other side. One would think that if that's all it takes, there'd be interdimensional plane travel taking place accidentally all the time in the Silver Age DC universe. There isn't, is there?)
In any case, there they are, and the contests begin. At first the two Wonder Women are evenly matched, but pretty soon our WW finds herself falling behind, because in this world she is mysteriously turned into a teenager. Don't ask why, I didn't, but of course I was six. From then on, things go from bad to worse:
and the good little Wonder Woman is easily trounced by her older, stronger, eviller counterpart. But just when it looks as if our heroine will get to go home alone, leaving Steve stranded in that evil universe, never to return (hooray!)...
Sigh. Well, at least we don't actually see a kiss. Personally I'm hoping that she actually decided to kick him out of the plane at this point, or at least give him a firm slap across the head. That's my happy ending for this story.
Oh, and in case the reader happened to miss the point, here's the comic's author (I have to assume) making sure to drive it home:
So...did she lose? Yes. Yes, she did.
Oh, and Blogger tells me that this is my 100th post! Amazing, I feel like I just started this thing.
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